Existing approaches for monitoring storage resources are limited to providing alerts based on raw space and to alerts based on percentages of space used. Alerts based on raw space require an operator to manually tune each storage container's thresholds based on its intended use and size. Alerts based on percentages of space used are better than alerts based on raw space in that they do not require manual tuning based on size, but still require manual tuning based on the intended use of the volume.
Storage resources (e.g., storage servers) typically include a plurality of storage containers (e.g. physical and/or logical volumes), which in turn may be providing storage for different types of file systems. Different types of file systems often involve different rates of change within their respective storage containers. For modern large enterprises with thousands of storage containers, manual tuning is impractical.
By way of example, storage containers holding shared program files change rarely, and can typically stand to be relatively full, whereas volumes holding log files may grow and shrink drastically over their normal life. A single percentage threshold setting does not work across all storage containers, thereby requiring manual tuning by an operator.
Accordingly, there is a need for monitoring storage resources without the limitations of the prior art.